Furthermore, healthcare and life sciences are both booming sectors with regards to artificial intelligence applications. Many other companies are also working at the intersection of technology and biology, given the numerous challenges that are present in the fields of drug discovery and protein folding. For example, Deepmind and Isomorphic Labs have made immense progress with AlphaFold, another leading foundation model ecosystem to better understand protein folding. Meta created something similar with its ESM Metagenomic Atlas. Given the increasing rates of catastrophic disease and the rapidly evolving nature of pathogens, scientists in these sectors hope to use the best of the advancements in AI to help solve some of biology’s toughest challenges.

Indeed, the immense progress that has been made thus far has paved the way for monumental scientific inventions and developments to emerge in the years ahead. Undoubtedly, this work is just getting started.

Many people have experienced frustration when dealing with artificial intelligence chatbots for customer support or technical assistance. New research from the University of Kansas has found when dealing with embarrassing issues, people prefer the anonymity and nonjudgmental nature of AI chatbots. However, when angry, they still preferred dealing with a fellow human.

The COVID-19 pandemic both angered and embarrassed people around the world as they dealt with new and frequently changing information and misinformation on vaccines, social distancing and related topics. KU researchers conducted a lab-based experimental study in which they gauged people’s attitudes about vaccines, showed them content that could arouse anger or embarrassment and randomly assigned them AI or human assistance to further gauge their knowledge and attitudes about vaccines.

Vaibhav Diwanji, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at KU and lead author of the study, researches new and emerging technologies’ influence on consumers.